Hello to you all! Welcome to Development Log #2 (version 2, since I kind of accidentally deleted the finished post, and had to write it again... :( ). Over the last week I've been working on a number of things, from making unit movement as smooth and responsive as possible, to designing hair styles and armour. As you may have noticed by now, I tend to hop about between various different things during development. While I have been working on being slightly more organised, I tend to find swapping about keeps me refreshed, and I always seem to have ideas on how to improve things that I'm not currently working on.

Anyway. Today I'm going to be talking about statistics, the changes I'm going to be making this time around, and how they effect gameplay. One of the major issues I always found with the first iteration of Claustrophobia was that the three main stats (Strength, Agility, and Intelligence) never really had much effect on your character. Also, by their very nature, players were forced to build the single stat that corresponded with their class, to the point where there was just no variation in the gear that you chose to wear. The only thing that effected that choice was which piece had the higher number.

Of course, in a game primarily designed around glorious loot, I feel like that system could have been designed much better. So, this time around, I'll be doing things a little differently. For a start, the three main stats have been split into five, and the player will recieve a number of points each level to place into these five areas. The five main stats in turn will effect minor stats, such as hit chance, critical strike chance, and spell power. These minor stats will also be effected directly by pieces of gear, which will also feature hit chances, such as chance to knockback, chance to burn, or cooler things like chance to summon a demon or an increase in sight range.

These changes will mean that classes will have both multiple stats to build into, and individual gear pieces will actually effect your play style. Hybrid classes will also be possible, with stats split three or more ways. The five major stats will effect minor stats as followed:

This is subject to change, and anybody who has opinions on stats that could be switched about, I will be pleased to hear from you. The idea behind this design was that each class would be encouraged to split their points into at least two stats, and that those stats could be shared so that they don't only benefit one class. For example, if you are a melee fighter who simply requires more mana, you could build Wisdom without wasting points on Intelligence.

I haven't quite yet decided on how exactly classes will work this time around. I love the idea of allowing the player to create their own skill set as they go along, but I think that having some sort of starting point in any RPG is useful. I'm toying with the idea of having something akin to a job system, where you start as a base class and then specialise further into the game. Or something similar to the old system, but instead of allowing every class to be built at once, maybe splitting them into parts and then allowing the player to choose a number of those parts to build a skill tree. If you have any preferences, leave them in the comments below.

Right, with all that done (twice now, I've learnt an important lesson about saving things), I think it's time for a coffee. I leave you with an ingame shot of the new tooltip system, which I personally think is quite pretty, as far as tooltips go.

The item database hasn't actually been written yet, so the content of the tooltip is purely placeholder, but the layout and design is pretty much finished. Damage Per Turn is an average from the combination of damage types shown below, while the blue stats are changes to both minor and major stats. Gear will also require either a level or a certain amount of base stats.